Television devices such as LCD or Plasma televisions reproduce a wide range of content for people of all ages, backgrounds, beliefs, nationalities, ethnics, religions, etc. There are times when certain content reproduced by the television is appropriate for one viewer, while being inappropriate for a second viewer because of the second viewer's age, background, belief, nationality, ethnic culture, religion, etc.
Previously, steps have been taken to limit or preclude presentation of certain content that is deemed inappropriate to a set or subset of viewers. Most content such as music and video (e.g., movies and television programs) is encoded with a decimal value representing a rating of the content. The broadcast industry includes a set of voluntary ratings with values for TV-Y (all children), TV-Y7 (older children), TV-Y7FV (older children, fantasy & violence), TV G (general audience), TV-PG (parental guidance), TV-14 (patents strongly cautioned), TV-MA (mature audiences), etc. A security device is included within all televisions of 13″ or greater produced after Jan. 1, 2000. This device provides a pin-protected (password) way for a parent to disable certain content from being accessed by a viewer (e.g., child). To make this work, each program is encoded according to their rating on line 21 of the broadcast signal's vertical blanking interval using the Extended Data Services (XDS) protocol, and this rating is detected by the television set's V-chip. If the rating is outside the level configured as acceptable, the program is blocked. News or sports casts do not currently have ratings.
In a similar way, most set-top boxes have their own parental controls integrated into the set-top box. For example, DirectTV has parental controls that allow viewing based on MPAA ratings, block specific movies or even lock out entire channels. Such mechanisms either use the voluntary ratings as described above or, for movies, the MPAA movie ratings of G (general audience), PG (parental guidance suggested), PG-13 (inappropriate for under 13), R (under 17 requires an adult) and NC-17 (no one under 17), etc. Ratings such as this are often encoded into broadcast movies as well as movies provided on media such as disk (DVD, Blueray).
Other methods of categorizing content and encoding the category with the content are known as well as hardware/software analysis of the content to determine levels of appropriateness. For example, speech recognition is used on the audio track to detect a list of inappropriate words for a certain audience or video is analyzed for certain content such as detection of a high percentage of flesh tones or detection of certain anatomical features indicating nudity that, to some, is inappropriate. This too is useful in preventing the delivery of inappropriate content to a set or subset of viewers.
The above techniques are useful when all viewers of a particular television are homogeneous, in that, they all share the same age category (e.g., all are adult), belief system, religion, etc. The above techniques become difficult to manage when only a subset of viewers is of a certain age, belief system, religion, etc.
The biggest issue is in a household of non-homogeneous viewers, such as when there are young children, possibly older children and adults. Each time an adult wishes to view content that is inappropriate for the children, the adult must unlock the parental controls/v-chip and then, remember to relock the parental controls/v-chip when finished. This alone leads to a lack of use due to the constant hassle required to enable/disable these controls. Furthermore, this does not preclude the unintended viewer from intruding on an intended viewer while the intended viewer is enjoying content that is inappropriate for the unintended viewer. For example, if adults are viewing violent or erotic content and their young child awakens and walks into the room where such viewing is being done.
What is needed is a television system that will monitor viewers present in a room and adjust settings based upon those viewers.